If we see biotech as part of a small farmer's 'toolbox', then we must ask what it is we are 'fixing':

Ensuring resilience in the face of climate change

Ensuring smallholders’ livelihoods are maintained & promoted

Ensuring everyone has access to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food produced in ethical and ecologically sound ways, and their right to democratically determine their own food and agriculture systems.

The focus of our discussion here was proposed to be on “sustainable” “food systems” for “small farmers” not “high yield” to generate “more money” from “small pieces of land.” And yet the meeting has presented many solutions that are still in the lab, and products with very initial results. The current supply of food already exceeds demand but there are serious issues around good governance and equitable distribution of food. Merely securing a high yield of a few select crops does not solve the problem of hunger nor secure livelihoods for smallholders, and leads to high levels of post-harvest spoilage and food waste.

There has been a lot of discussion about what we mean by biotechnology, and yet the majority of the focus of the conference has been on GMO products. It is malicious and deceptive to refer to GM crops as "biotech crops".

Those technologies that manipulate DNA artificially increase corporate control over seeds, diminish rich, diverse diets of local communities, promote monoculture, increase biosafety risks to health and environment, and need high investment and complicated regulatory frameworks which many countries lack. We ask those from the private sector who are calling for international acceptance of their products once approved in one country whether they are prepared to accept global liability for their products once disseminated?

We’d like to remind the group that 80% of the world’s food is produced by small farmers and farmer autonomy is critical to maintaining current and future food security and food sovereignty for everyone. We reject solutions that increase the cost of production for farmers due to the high cost of inputs from transnational corporations. We respect farmers as true in-situ innovators and not as passive consumers of the ‘biotech toolbox’.

All present should keep in mind the FAO Policy on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples which includes Indigenous rights to:

Self-determination;

Free, Prior and Informed Consent;

Participation and collaboration;

Rights over land and other resources; and

Gender equality.

Governments and scientists must take a holistic view of addressing the negative consequences of industrialised agriculture and avoid a ‘bandaids on cancer’ approach when it is imperative to address the causes.

Rather than being distracted by the shiny technocratic solutions of the GMO industry, FAO should continue its important work on promoting farmers’ access to native and locally adapted seeds and breeds, markets and value chains, and on promoting agroecology as the best way to feed the world and face the challenges of climate change.

Story by Russ Grayson, November 2014

STRANGE is not an adjective commonly used to describe food and food processing, however we may see more of it if recent events are any indication.

Strangeness and McDonalds, you might think, go well together when it comes to the corporation's fast foods — after all, they've a campaign in the US to convince customers that their Chicken McNuggets are not made from an oozing pink paste extruded from pulverised meat, according to Dan Nosowitz at modernfarmer.com. But that's not the strangeness I'm getting at. That strangeness is MacDonalds rejecting a new, GM potato for its food preparation — you read it right, they rejected the thing and all other GM potatoes as well.

The badly-named new potato, the Innate Potato (really, who would give a potato a name like this?) says Dan Nosowitz, is the engineering creation of the agribusiness corporation, Simplex, and it's designed to withstand bruising, browning and to contain less of the amino acid, acrylamide, which Dan says was speculated on back in 2002 as being a suspected carcinogen.

The difficulty of producing GM-FREE icecream

Still on things GMO, the icecream maker, Ben & Jerry's, committed to sourcing only GM-free ingredients for its products this year but says finding sources of GM-free milk will take a lot longer. That's because something around 90 percent of corn grown in the US is GM, as is much of the soy, and a lot of this is fed to cows that produce the milk that goes into Ben & Jerry's products.

This demonstrates the difficulty companies wanting to go GM free face in the US. But what about Australian eaters? I don't recall who it was that told me, it was a few years ago now, but they seemed in-the-know and suggested that Australians who eat imported foods would likely have been eating GM ingredients for some time. They went on to say that there is no evidence that GM foods are injurious to human health.

Those with a distaste for GM would likely challenge that last comment and cite scientific reports linking GM foods with disease. It's not a small number of reports that count, however. Rather, it's the scientific consensus, and the scientific community is still out on that.

You can't simplify opposition to GM on health grounds alone. There's a whole range of objections to GM food, ranging from the health fears through to the attitude that GM has potential when focused on real food supply issues like developing drought-resistant crops, but not under the control of a handful of corporations that could come to control our food supply. Then there are economic/political objections about the contaminating drift of genetic material onto non-GM crops and the possibility of the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds that have adapted to the herbicide sprayed on GM crops. The anti-GM lobby is often portrayed as monolithic, but it really is not and contains a range of attitudes to the technology.

One more cup of coffee before I go (apologies to Bob Dylan)

I was flicking through my news feeds on Flipboard the other day (Flipboard for iOS is where I find the news I'm interested in rather than that which some newspaper editor of radio or TV producer thinks I should read, see or hear — I haven't bought a newspaper for at least ten years and am all the better and more diversely informed for that). Suddenly, a headline caught my attention — the coffee corporation Starbucks was joining with US agribusiness and GM crop developer Monsanto to challenge the US state of Vermont for its introducing labeling legislation to identify GM food products. Musician, Neil Young, immediately went public saying that he had drank his last coffee at Starbucks.

Wondering why Starbucks would risk its reputation gained for using fair trade coffees, I looked a little deeper and found clarification on Snopes.com. According to that source, Starbucks is a member of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and it is that group that is challenging Vermont over GMO labeling requirements, not Starbucks in collusion with Monsanto, as was alleged.

The SumOfUs website has launched a campaign to pressure Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee on the allegation:

[quote author="SumOfUs" image="https://afsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/logo.png" w="105" h="97" image_align="right"]Starbucks doesn't think you have the right to know what's in your coffee, so it's teamed up with Monsanto to sue the small U.S. state of Vermont to stop you from finding out ('Starbucks Teams Up With Monsanto - the Most Hated Company in the World' http://action.sumofus.org/a/starbucks-gmo-gma/?sub=homepage).[/quote]

The website is something of a bad news dump that suffers from the common activist practice of focusing on everything that's wrong but less of what is being done that is good. That's my impression looking at their homepage, anyway. This is a campaigning organisation and at least they offer petitions so visitors can make the easy slacktivist response of signing a petition aimed at Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee.

SumOfUs says Starbucks is hiding behind the "shadowy Grocery Manufacturers' Association", yet Snopes.com found that "GMA has a web site that presents their clear stance on the issue of genetically modified foods and labeling and that included a 2014 membership directory openly listing Starbucks and Monsanto as members". Starbucks, an affiliate member, is one of 300 GMA member organisations.

Starbucks wasn't long is responding to the allegations, saying the coffee corporation " …is not a part of any lawsuit pertaining to GMO labeling nor have we provided funding for any campaign. And Starbucks is not aligned with Monsanto to stop food labeling or block Vermont State law."

The focus on Starbucks is to encourage the corporation to apply pressure on the Association to drop the legal challenge. This reminds me very much on the tactics used by Greenpeace, I think it was, when they focused on Apple's use of Chinese corporations employing overworked and cheap Chinese labour to manufacture their digital devices. That was diluted somewhat when a writer pointed out that HP, Samsung and others also used the same suppliers under the same labour conditions. Singling out a particular business might sometimes work, but only if that business is influential enough to bring change in its industry. Apple took the initiative by requiring its Chinese suppliers to introduce better working conditions.

Supplying selective information that is reframed to position a corporation or other entity in unfavourable light so as to encourage it to press for changes is a tactic adopted by some social change and environmental organisations, yet it is the sort of things those lobbies accuse their opponents of doing. When it is exposed, then it can discredit the lobbies as well as their campaigns.

The tactic is not based on telling a complete lie, just on a selective use of information. Any journalist worth their words would — and should — disclose it and ask why lobbies supposedly working in the public interest resort to the exact same tactics as those they oppose. This is how the selective information/reframing tactic can backfire when it shines the journalistic light on the organisation making the allegations rather than the issue at hand.

Join Seed Freedom Fortnight — 2-16 October 2013

Dr Vandana Shiva, an articulate and outspoken critic of the corporate-controlled food system, is calling a day of civil disobedience on 2 October to honor Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, at the start of the 2nd Global Seed Freedom Fortnight.

View the video above to hear Dr Shiva explain what this fortnight means and why it is so important:

Let us celebrate our Seed and Food Freedom. And commit ourselves to defend it. No matter how much the corporations would like to take over our seed and food, we will not allow them. And when we stand together, as one humanity, each of us in our little place, but one in our consciousness, one in our solidarity, one in our common commitment to Seed Freedom, and Food Freedom, we are a bigger power than the most brutal corporations, and their dictatorships.

IN A MOVE that places it at the centre of Australia's food supply, Monsanto has acquired a 19.9 percent share of Western Australia's InterGrain, the company that produces seed for 40 percent of all wheat grown in Australia.

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance's Nick Rose says that the acquisition is undemocratic and has called for a full public debate...

Four years after the moratorium on Terminator technology was reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), proposals to develop and commercialize ‘genetic-use restriction technologies’ (GURTs) are back on the agenda for policymakers and the biotechnology industry.

Terminator is a threat to food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity: ending the moratorium on Terminator will increase control of seed by transnational corporations (TNCs) and restrictions on farmers’ rights to save and plant harvested seed. Additionally, pollen from genetically-modified (GM) crops with Terminator will contaminate non-GM and organic crops, and native plant species. GURTs (herein referred to as ‘Terminator’) are genetic engineering technologies that seek to control plant fertility.

First-generation Terminator (also called ‘suicide seed’) was developed by the US Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land Company in the 1990s to protect the intellectual property of US agricultural biotechnology TNCs. GM crops produce sterile seeds to prevent farmers from replanting harvested seed with patented DNA. Due to international public outcry from farmers and civil society worldwide, Terminator has never been commercialized anywhere, and Brazil and India have national moratoriums prohibiting it.

In 2000, the CBD recommended a moratorium on field-testing and commercial sale of Terminator seeds. In 2006, pressure from La Via Campesina and its allies helped to strengthen this moratorium in Curitiba, Brazil. That year, US-based TNC Monsanto Company, the largest seed company in the world, acquired Delta and Pine Land, along with the intellectual property rights to Terminator.

Since then industry, the US and European governments and ultra-rich philanthro-capitalists have ramped up rhetoric on the need for Terminator and other biotechnologies to adapt to the climate, energy and food crises.

Various false solutions are being proposed to sell the lie that techno-fixes allow rich countries to continue consuming resources and emitting carbon dioxide, unabated:

Monsanto is proposing that monoculture plantations of its Roundup Ready soybeans qualify for carbon credits under so-called “no-till” agriculture. All of these false solutions create new markets for agricultural biotechnology and ‘extreme genetic engineering’. With financing by the US government and British Petroleum (BP), in May, Synthetic Genomics, the company founded.

Craig Venter (which helped to sequence the human genome) announced that it had created the first-ever synthetic, self-reproducing microbe with synthetic biology. Venter’s team claims that the microbe can be used to produce clean, green algal biofuels; however, what will happen if this microbe escapes into the wild and contaminates non-synthetic algae with its DNA? Similarly, what will happen when a GM maize variety engineered to have a high amount of stover (the stalks, husks, etc. of maize) for cellulosic agrofuels contaminates food maize varieties? The implications are frightening.

Industry is now claiming that Terminator is needed to contain genetic contamination (transgene flow) of food crops and other natural life forms from genetically-engineered DNA in non-food crops; in essence, as a precautionary, environmental necessity. Venter recently told the New York Times that Terminator should be employed to contain transgenic contamination. Genetic contamination of non-GM and organic food crops from GM crops, which occurs through the spread of GM pollen by wind and bees, is gaining recognition as a growing ecological and economic problem. On June 21st the US Supreme Court ruled on Monsanto Co vs. Geertson Seed Farms, and recognized that transgenic contamination is “harmful and onerous to organic and conventional farmers,” and grounds for litigation against biotechnology TNCs.

Thus a new generation of Terminator research is focused on biological containment to prevent engineered genetic traits (transgenes) from spreading to non-GM food plants and wild relatives. It is highly unlikely that the industry that created the problem of genetic pollution will solve it with more biotechnology. Given BP’s difficulty to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, why would the US government entrust it to contain trangene flow from the world’s first synthetic life form?

Yet that is what is taking place. Europe has funded the Transcontainer Project with billions of euros, and there are proposals from right-wing Brazilian politicians to overturn the country’s national ban on Terminator. While application and commercialization of Terminator technologies can’t promise fail-safe containment of transgenes, they can function to control farmers’ access to seeds and germplasm. Under the guise of environmental security for GM crops, industry will use the new generation of Terminator technologies to tighten its grasp on proprietary germplasm, and restrict the rights of farmers to re-plant harvested seeds.

Further, the likely prospect of contamination of food crops by GM crops engineered with Terminator places the entire global food supply at imminent risk, and it therefore poses unacceptable threats to food and seed sovereignty and agro-biodiversity. TNCs are expanding and consolidating control over the world’s croplands, rangelands, peat bogs and last remaining forests, while simultaneously consolidating control of the genetic commons at cellular and molecular levels.

Terminator technologies for synthetic biology, GM crops for agrofuels, geoengineering and all of the other false solutions to the energy, climate and food crises enclose vast genetic resources and agrobiodiversity, taking them out of the public realm and into the control of TNCs, especially the US Big Biotech giants Monsanto, Dupont and Arborgen. Organizing against Terminator in 2010 - what you can do It is critical that La Via Campesina, small farmers, NGOs and consumers throughout the world organize to stop Terminator’s return.

Pressure by civil society at the CBD meeting in May resulted in two draft moratoriums against synthetic biology and geoengineering, giving a boost to mobilization against Terminator at the next CBD meeting in Nagoya, Japan, October 18-29 2010, where industry will likely try and overturn the moratorium. Because industry’s rhetoric for Terminator is based on false solutions to climate change, organizing against it will also be critical at the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, November 29 to December 10, 2010.

The international coordination of La Via Campesina is asking its members, allies and all consumers to:

Write letters, request meetings, launch cyber-campaigns, etc. to pressure with your government representatives who will be representing your country in the CBD and UNFCCC negotiations to uphold the moratorium on Terminator in Japan and Cancun. It is vital that organizations and individuals in India and Brazil pressure their governments to maintain national their moratoriums. For your convenience, use and adapt the attached standard letter.

Send as many people as possible to the CBD and UNFCCC meetings in Japan and Cancun;

Resources

“The race to make fuel out of algae poses risks as well as benefits.” Dina Fine Maron, Environment and Energy Publishing. July 22, 2010;

“Exploring Algae as Fuel.” Andrew Pollack, The New York Times. July 26 2010.